12 AUGUST 1871, Page 3

Lord Houghton, in a well-turned speech at the centenary in

'honour of Miss Hope Scott, the sole survivor of the line, men- tioned the kind of loneliness in which the names of all the great

• littdrateurs stand. They have rarely left descendants. We have no Shakespeare, no Milton, no Bacon, no Newton, no Pope, no Byron ; Italy has no Dante, no Tetrarch, no Ariosto, or Alfieri ; 'Germany has no Goethe, no Schiller, no Heine ; France has no Montaigne, no Descartes, no Voltaire, no Latnartine. There is no descendant known of Luther, Calvin, or John Knox. The fact is remarkable, and not favourable to the theory of an indefinite progress of humanity. The race of the very great does not multiply, while the race of the very little, say any Irish hodman, is as the sands of the sea.